A former ally of deposed Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected president of the protest-wracked country in a widely boycotted vote, on Friday sparking another outpouring of anger on the streets.
Huge crowds massed once again in Algiers vowing to keep up their campaign for the total dismantling of the political establishment, following former Algerian prime minister Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s victory in Thursday’s poll.
“The vote is rigged. Your elections are of no concern to us and your president will not govern us,” demonstrators chanted after polls marred by unrest and a low turnout.
Photo: AFP
“Tebboune is worse than Bouteflika. He’s known for being one of the thieves,” said Meriem, a 31-year-old civil servant. “We did not vote and we will not back down.”
Yet, Tebboune struck a conciliatory tone toward the protest movement.
“I extend my hand to the Hirak for a dialogue to build a new Algeria,” he told his first news conference following the poll.
The 74-year-old took just more than 58 percent of the vote, trouncing his four fellow contenders without the need for a runoff, said Mohamed Charfi, chairman of Algeria’s electoral commission.
All five candidates served under the two-decade rule of Bouteflika, 82, who resigned in the face of mass demonstrations in April.
The deeply unpopular election had been championed by the army as a way of restoring stability after almost 10 months of street protests.
The candidates — who included another former Algerian prime minister, Ali Benflis, 75, and former Algerian minister of culture Azzedine Mihoubi — were widely rejected by protesters as “children of the regime.”
A record six in 10 Algerians abstained in the vote, Charfi said — the lowest turnout for a multiparty election since independence from France in 1962.
Tens of thousands rallied on election day in central Algiers, where police with water cannons and helicopters tried to disperse them.
On Friday, protesters took to the streets again in response to calls on social media under the slogan “Tebboune is not my president.”
Said, a 32 year-old engineer from Bouira, said that he had made the 100km journey to the capital to take part in the demonstrations.
“I spent the night here so I could demonstrate again ... and say we don’t recognize their election or their president,” he said.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency